While many on the forum admire Egwene's relentlessness and willingness to sacrifice life and love for her goals (she'd make a good CEO, wouldn't she?) and many seem to see her ascent as parallel to Rand's, I haven't come across this idea..

Shortly put, Egwene represents abstract thinking and order. She is the masculine sun god, ruling from the Apollonian heights of her phallic Tower with her relentless greed. Rand is the fertile mother, a figurative Venus of Willendorf fused and inseparable from the Earth ("the Dragon is one with the land" ), not the conquering ruler (s)he set out to be. (S)he is the archetypal female "through which all life flows". It is this feminine identity that allowed the Dragon to gain his victory this time around - Telamon failed by remaining stubbornly masculine to the end. He never became "the Lord of Chaos", i.e. embraced the chaotic side of nature where good and evil intermingle: a realization (the DO was not evil) that led to Rand's victory.

Similarly the One Power reflects the conception of male and female identities. To quote Freud, "Man fears that his strength will be taken from him by woman, dreads becoming infected with her femininity and then proving himself a weakling". The fragility of masculinity is reflected in the way men handle the Power - constantly fighting it in a life-affirming battle, consciously needing to prove their worth to grasp the Power. Saidin is always close to tearing down the man willing to grasp it while saidar engulfs the willing woman who embraces it. The analogy here is to sex: the post-coital man is empty and weak, having been engulfed and swallowed by the woman in one rhythmic dance, whilst the woman remains undiminished, controlling the flow and rhythm of the sex. This groundedness allows women greater control over the Power since they, unlike men, can do finer things with less Power.

I wish there was a piece of evidence pointing that men are more easily burnt out (a sudden, violent orgasm compared to a steadier one). The arrythmic way men's prowess grows compared to women's steady ascent comes to mind.